General Assembly Post-Game Wrap-Up/Pre-Game Show: Thursday, May 22, 2025
The Big Story: Senate To Consider Inspector General Bill Today.
SB 4 (Sturgeon) will pass, likely unanimously. Bipartisan sponsors in both houses. Governor has said he supports it. Unless the Speaker Of The House opposes it, I see little difficulty getting it through the House.
Here is yesterday’s Session Activity Report. Yes, the Speaker’s horrible bill covering up violations by nurses cleared the House Sunset Committee. No sense voting against it and ending up in the line of fire.
Today is the last Session Day before mark-up of the budget. General Assembly will be out of session during the next two weeks during the mark-up. Meaning, we have two fairly long agendas today.
In addition to the IG bill, today’s Senate Agenda features some good criminal justice bills, specifically SS1/SB 10 (Townsend), SB 139 (Pinkney), and SS1/SB 17 (Townsend). These three bills, along with the IG bill, represent an ambitious and progressive day of work.
Today’s House Agenda, OTOH, seems more like a clearinghouse of relatively minor bills. HB 119 (Griffith) is an anti-censorship bill pertaining to Delaware libraries. Other than that, nothing else intrigues me.
Well, that was short and sweet. Kinda like me.
Inspector General bill passes unanimously in the Senate. Darius Brown, who has been absent quite a bit lately, was absent.
I’m confused about your opposition to HB 148. It looks to me like it grants the Board of Nursing a new authority, which can only be used in a situation where it can do nothing under current law. Is there some context I’m missing here?
The Board already has the authority to sanction licensees who fail to live up to the standards of their profession.
This gives them ‘two strikes’ that are not made public before sanctions would be imposed.
I used to be the Research Analyst for the Joint Sunset Committee ‘way back in the ’80’s. This type of two-tiered justice was all too common, including among doctors, dentists and chiropractors. ‘Connected’ practitioners all too often evaded sanctions despite in some cases being a danger to the public. It’s why we added public members to the boards.
Delaware Way Good Ol’ Boy stuff. The licensing boards have become more transparent since then. This is a step backwards, and is even more suspicious when the sponsor of the bill is herself a licensee under the auspices of the Board Of Nursing.
I showed the bill to my wife, who is a nurse. She has a different problem with it – she worries that it could allow disciplinary action to be taken over trivial things or things that are really hospital management’s fault, or that the petty SOBs of the world will find it easier to use the board as a weapon. And there are unfortunately a lot of petty SOBs in nursing – including managers. She’s seen friends get railroaded over ridiculous stuff.
Personally, having thought it over a bit more, I’m not sure why the board needs to be involved at all if no violation has occurred. “Matters of concern” should be handled by management.
All I can tell you is what the bill would do–and how it goes against what Title 24 of the Delaware Code seeks to ensure–that the public’s health, safety and welfare is reflected in the operations of the licensing boards.
There are investigative procedures in place to try to ensure that the kinds of petty discipline you reference are not elevated due to, um pettiness. One more reason we have public members on all the boards, including the Board of Nursing.
My only experience before licensing boards was assisting a massage therapist friend and her group of resistors to the new regs suddenly in front of them that were actually meant to corral owners of sex shops so the state could have legal access to sex work establishment owners, not just their workers’ criminal actions. The regs were to put extreme demands on legit therapists businesses.
I didn’t like what I observed in the several state board meetings in Dover in that the AG Deputy (DAG) assigned to the group had an extraordinary influence over the proceedings and basically what she said ruled the moment and the chair made it clear that the AG liaison had the last word. Actual healers (as in paid by insurance companies) were left out of the conversation.